It isn't too late to be jumping into this market. Flash has been the only product of it's kind for quite a while now, so with Web 2.0 picking up steam it only stands to reason that there would be another product jumping out there.

From my perspective it is a good thing. It will force Adobe to tighten up the pitiful resource hog that Flash has become.

And Vista hasn't been forced upon anyone. There's always MacOS or Linux if Windows isn't to your taste.

Once again.. ignorants talkinga bout the things they don't know... Silverlight is probably one of the best things that is happening to the internet in a while... Here... let me educate you about Silverlight... since I've working experience with it and flash.

1) Silverlight works on other browsers other than IE... including Firefox... support for other browsers is currently being worked on..

2) Silverlight currently works on Windows, MAC OS and even linux...

3) Silverlight specially 1.0 is mostly for video stream... this technology is great for streaming video... did you know that video can be streamed even if no Media Player is installed on the computer? Version 1.1 (currently in beta) will introduce a more complete framework to create client/server applications with dev env.. like Blend...

4) Silverlight is able to run managed code which is very fast compared to javascript even flash... here is some test cases...

This gives me 3 test-cases to compare:

Multiply two numbers n times in pure javascript. Multiply two numbers n times, by calling Multiply(a,b) from JavaScript into managed code n times Multiply two numbers n times, by calling MultiplyLoop(a,b,n) from Javascript into managed code one time.

What I found was:

JavaScript is fairly slow to do this (345 ms for 10 millions calculations). Calling a managed method millions of times is VERY slow (IE asked me several times whether I wanted to abort it before it finished) Calling a managed method once and do the looping in managed code is VERY fast (0-2 ms).

get it?

5) Multi-language development environment... Silverlight supports all languages that are .net enabled... which means, developers don't have to learn new languages... nor you have to go into another develoment environment or learn a technology specific language like action script that you can only use with flash.. (yes, I know flash and action script just in case one of you fools think I don't know about flash)...

6) speed... and video quality... this is why companies like Netflix, thefootnetwork are switching to silverlight to distribute video.... here try it and see for yourself: http://www.foodnetwork.com/...

lol... it's not going to work? it's already too late... lots of companies are starting to use it... because it performs and work very well... sadly... anti-microsoft people even without knowing what silverlight is and how it works... already dismiss it... but then again... this kind of people always exsisted... lol.